Product Description

Solutions for falling sales and faltering retailers
In Winning at Retail, two prominent retail consultants offer strategies for retailers and chains suffering at the hands of decreased sales numbers. Using case studies from such success stories as Costco, Target, and Walgreens, they cover customer service, retail strategy, demographics, and the latest trends in retailing. For retailers to survive, they must adapt to the new realities of the marketplace. McMillan’s cutting-edge advice and the unique "EST" model in this book shows them how.

Willard Ander (Chicago, IL) is a Senior Partner at McMillan Doolittle who specializes in strategy and the analysis of consumer trends. He has worked with such clients as General Motors, Sears, McDonald’s, and Amoco on strategy and new store development.

Neil Stern (Chicago, IL) is a Senior Partner at McMillan Doolittle who specializes in strategic planning and the creative development of new retail concepts. He leads the company’s food consulting practice and has worked with such clients as Publix Supermarkets, Chevron Oil, and Procter & Gamble.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #120725 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

From the Inside Flap
The business of retail is getting tougher every year. Consumers have more choice than ever and are far more selective about where they shop. With more retailers and more stores chasing an aging and discerning customer, it’s no wonder that big names in retail have recently gone bust. From Merry-Go-Round and eToys to Service Merchandise and Woolworth, the retail landscape is littered with the bodies of fallen champions. Once shining stars of business, these former market leaders went from the top of the heap to the trash heap before they even knew what hit them.

In Winning at Retail, top retail consultants offer candid, straightforward, and passionate guidance for retailers who understand that winning at this game means setting themselves apart from the pack. Based on McMillan|Doolittle’s long history of documenting retail’s biggest players and best practices, this book shows what separates the winners from the losers, and imparts vital lessons on what works and what doesn’t in today’s retail environment.

Today’s top retailers all have one thing in common--they establish defined market positions for themselves, and carve out a particular place in the customer’s mind. In short, they dedicate themselves to being the best at something and they defend that advantage at all costs. The savviest retailers know that trying to be everything to everyone didn’t work for Kmart, and it won’t work for them.

Winning at Retail introduces the Est model for retail success. The Est model guides business leaders in making their company the best in one of five critical areas--assortment (biggest), price (cheapest), fashion (hottest), customer service (easiest), and speed of service (quickest). Establishing a position as a leader in one of these five areas is ultimately the secret of success for Wal-Mart, Kohl’s, Target, and other winning retailers.

Winning at Retail offers all the tools retailers need to establish and implement an effective strategy for long-term growth. It covers all the latest trends in the retail industry and presents unbeatable advice on quickly responding to changes in customer demographics and competition. As true a cliché today as it was yesterday, retail is all about the customers. But customers and their tastes change rapidly--this one-of-a-kind resource shows retailers how to keep up.

From the Back Cover
Praise for Winning At Retail

"Winning at Retail offers the most effective strategies available for retailers. At McDonald’s, the ‘Quick-EST’ model is crucial, because being close and convenient to where our customers live, work, and shop helps us create maximum value. If you want to harness your company’s strengths to become a leader in your category--and stay in tune with what your customers want--this is the book for you."
--Jim Rand, Senior Vice President of Business Development, McDonald’s Corporation

"Winning at Retail provides a thoughtful approach to retail differentiation. Ander and Stern warn of the ‘treacherous middle’ into which retailers too easily drift. They inspire us to avoid this peril through case studies of retailers who have assumed leadership through courageous choice."
--Robert L. Price, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Wawa

"In a difficult retail environment, this book provides crucial guidance for staying on top of your competition--by taking the customer seriously and leveraging your strengths to provide experiences that increase customer loyalty. Will Ander and Neil Stern elegantly argue that you can’t always be the biggest, fastest, and trendiest place on the block, but it takes only one of these ‘Ests’ to be a category leader. Businesses big and small can benefit from the carefully distilled lessons in this book."
--Bernd Schmitt, Professor of Marketing, Columbia Business School and author of Customer Experience Management

About the Author
WILLARD N. ANDER is a Partner with McMillan|Doolittle, a global retail consultancy with clients around the world. He consults on strategy, new store development, and retail best practices with such clients as General Motors, Publix, Lands’ End, McDonald’s, Best Buy, The Great Indoors, and BP/Amoco. He is a graduate of Stanford University and a former assistant professor at the University of Houston.
NEIL Z. STERN is a Senior Partner with McMillan|Doolittle who specializes in the strategic planning and development of new retail concepts. His clients include Safeway, Procter & Gamble, Harris Teeter, Wawa, Radio Shack, and Chevron/Texaco. He is the Editor of McMillan|Doolittle’s Retail Watch newsletter and is a graduate of Columbia University.

Customer Reviews

A Winning Book
As a business student, the book "Winning at Retail" gave me effective and simple strategies for understanding how to evaluate and critique retail concepts. In their accessible text, Ander and Stern manage to distill complex and constantly-evolving retail concepts into an intuitive model that will guide readers who need to quickly and intelligently assess how successfully a retail concept delivers value to customers.

If you're seeking an outline for the particulars of cash-flow management, marketshare, procurement strategies etc., this book won't satisfy. Stern and Ander don't excavate details. Instead, they hover at a conceptual level and methodically reduce high-achieving retailers' major differentiating factors to a workable, comprehensible 5-point "EST-model". The authors concede immediately that no retailer can (or ought to) be strong on all points of their model, since vigor on one axis may preclude a company from muscle on another. They argue that a retail concept must prevail on at least one or two points on the EST model to secure a place among the top three retailers in a segment (which, the authors say, is how to prevent consumer neglect and ultimately, the company's failure). The strengths of the EST model are both its intuitiveness to the reader and its simple construction.

The tome is pithy and easy to read. Stern and Ander sustained my attention throughout by using a familiar -- yet diverse -- set of retailers to illustrate the models. I encourage any reader who wants to appreciate what differentiates compelling retailers that stay relevant to consumers from the many that end their days in "the black hole of retail" to read Winning at Retail immediately.

Insightful!
Montgomery Ward, Woolworth's and Pets.com stumbled into irrelevancy before they knew what hit them. Authors and retail consultants Willard Ander and Neil Stern explain what went wrong and tell retailers how to stay alive and thrive. They prescribe their theory, called "Est," as in the superlative suffix. Be the best, they say, in assortment (biggest), price (cheapest), customer service (easiest), speed of service (quickest) or fashion (hottest). Being "pretty good" at everything no longer works. The abundance of choices in today's transparent, digital marketplace has spawned information-overloaded, fickle, demanding customers. The authors tend to generalize about what good companies are doing right rather than describing how also-ran retailers might turn things around, but there is plenty of advice here for those who are willing to take it. We recommend this glib pep talk of a book - if for no other reason than to jolt retailers out of believing they're doing everything possible to keep customers coming back.

The est model wins in Winning at Retail
The same retailers win year after year, Wal-mart, Target, Home Depot,Amazon while the rest barely hang on. Winning at retail tells retailers what they need, to be the _ est. Biggest, Cheapest, Quickest, Hottest. Customers have more choice and more options. The build it and they will come approach of most retailers is no longer enough. Retailers need to have the right product in the right place for the customer, or the customer will move on. Just like Good to Great, every retail company should check their strategy against Winning at Retail. Most strategies wouldnt pass, the best ones will.